Micah 7:17

Even A Worm Will Turn

Worms of the earth. Micah 7:17 (AV).

What is your opinion about worms? Do you exclaim, “ Ugh! Horrible creature!” when you meet one crawling over the garden path? Or are you like Charles Kingsley's little daughter who surprised and rather shocked a guest of her father's by crying out, “Oh, Daddy, look at this delightful worm!”

Now, of course, an earthworm may not be very lovely to look upon, but there's a very great deal to be said in its favor. To be quite honest, I doubt if the earth could get on at all if its worms came to a sudden end. They do such a useful and important work these insignificant creatures that they can't be done without. Suppose we take a good look at them and their work this morning.

I expect most of you have noticed that an earthworm's body is made of a great many rings as a matter of fact, there are usually over a hundred of these. The head end is slightly pointed, and it has a cover or hood which projects over the worm's mouth. This hood is very sensitive, and with it the worm seizes leaves or other objects. The worm has neither eyes nor ears, yet it can distinguish between light and darkness, and can hear a sound as slight as the tap of a bird's foot. A worm has no feet, but each ring of its body has four tiny bristles. These the creature can fix into the side of its burrow, and they help it to get along. As you know, it does its crawling by alternately elongating and contracting its body.

So much for its person! Now for its work! You may barely believe it, but the earthworm is the world's busiest and most hard-working ploughman. It turns over the soil more wonderfully than any plough, and it renews it and lets the air into it as well. It does this in three ways.

1. If the earth is soft it simply bores its way down, head first, and as it bores it produces from its body a sort of slime with which it coats the tunnel it is making. This slime hardens and keeps the earth together so that the tunnel does not fall in.

They say it was from watching and copying the methods of a worm that the man who built the famous Thames tunnel succeeded in preventing the tunnel from collapsing. Brunel for that was his name made a tube of steel which was driven into the earth and so kept it from falling down. Then between the tube and the earth he forced cement, which set and hardened as firm as a rock.

But to return to our worm! At the end of its tunnel it makes a sort of enlarged chamber or burrow, its home, to which it returns when in danger from above. It plugs the surface opening of this tunnel with leaves, because, though worms like moisture, they don't like too much rain. It is apt to fill their burrow and drown them out.

These tunnels allow air to get into the soil. They make a road for the raindrops to reach the roots of plants, and they give the delicate roots themselves a ready-made path.

2. When the soil is hard, or when it is much matted as with roots of grass the worm sets to work in another way. It eats its way through the soil. Then it comes to the surface and ejects the soil in the form of worm-castings these funny worm shaped little coils of earth that we have all seen on a garden lawn. In passing the earth through its body the worm does two things it extracts the vegetable and other nourishment it wants out of it, and it grinds it to powder. In this way the worm actually renews the surface of the earth, and the castings which it brings to the top make excellent growing soil for plants.

Charles Darwin, the famous scientist, was so interested in worms that he studied them for forty years and then wrote a book about them. He tells us that he collected and weighed the quantity of earth brought up to the square yard of soil in a year, and he found that it amounted to three and a half pounds. Those of you who are good at math can work out a sum and see how many tons that means to the acre.

3. The third way in which the worm works is just as marvelous. It comes to the surface in the evening (it dislikes light), it keeps the end of its body in the ground and it sweeps the rest of it round in a circle gathering all it can seize. It selects the leaves it wants and carries them down to its underground burrow. There it tears them to shreds, and covers them with a fluid that makes them easily digested. Then it nibbles them at its leisure. These buried leaves form a rich vegetable mold which is a splendid plant food.

When you hear all these tales about the worm's usefulness do you wonder that it is considered a valuable creature? They say that in the Yoruba country in Africa, the natives think so much of the earthworm that when they decide to break up new soil for a farm the first thing they do is to look for its traces. If there are none the natives try another locality. They know it is no use attempting to farm where there are no worms.

I have kept what I think the most extraordinary fact about a worm to the last. It is this. If, by accident, a worm be cut in two, each half turns into a whole worm, the head part grows a tail, and the tail part grows a head.

Now I don't want all the small boys present to go home and immediately start hunting worms that they may sever them in two. That would be no sport; it would be merely cruel and mean. But I do want them, and the girls too, to think about the fact, for it seems to me that the pluck of the worm which doesn't lose heart even when it has lost half of its being is worth imitating. It preaches a whole sermon to us, and its text is, “Never lose heart.”

If your plans are spoiled, and your hopes wrecked, and you feel for the moment as if everything were going wrong, cheer up! Out of that one sad failure you may, like the worm, with God's help, make two grand successes.